Everyone is worried about cybersecurity in the age of artificial intelligence, where new threats are always emerging, but some believe that 100% protection is a myth.

“We’re in a climate right now where everybody wants everything fixed. And I always look at it as a company, Red Hat or anybody else, has a finite amount of resources,” said Vincent Danen (pictured), vice president of product security at Red Hat Inc. “If we carved off the things that maybe didn’t matter so much or only dealt with them when they started to matter, when they’re being exploited, all those resources could be saved to focus on some of those proactive things.”

Danen spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the cybersecurity landscape has changed and Red Hat’s strategies moving forward. (* Disclosure below.)

Red Hat’s Vincent Danen discusses with theCUBE the struggle for resources when counteracting cybersecurity attacks.

Using AI to ease cybersecurity experts’ load

The proliferation of AI technologies means that security has to be viewed differently, according to Danen,, since safeguarding a model is a more complex job than safeguarding regular software.

“They’re not an apples-to-apples kind of comparison. We have to look at them in separate ways. And even the way that we classify, say, severity of a safety issue in a model is not going to be the same as severity in a product,” he said.

Despite the call for providing complete security upfront, Danen argues that since companies have limited resources, consumers need to be okay with “acceptable risk,” which he compares to crossing the street or getting on a flight.

“You have to use multiple technologies and multiple ways of addressing a threat. I think the balance that we have to strike is you can spend an insane amount of money on all these technologies, but you got to figure out which ones work best for you,” he said.

Burnout is a significant issue in the cybersecurity industry, according to Danen. He believes that AI could alleviate this problem by reducing the workload for engineers and security experts.

“We’re literally firefighters going from fire to fire,” he said. “If I can reduce that toil … I’m giving my people bandwidth to be able to maybe look for some of the more proactive things. We want to make technology that is trusted by our customers and useful for industry at large and just helping people on this planet.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Red Hat Summit: 

(* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE